I'm just back from the J.Boye Web and Intranet conference in Aarhus, Denmark. I went there to participate in the IKS Semantics UX contest that I had the honor to win. This invitation gave me a great opportunity to be a part of this unique conference. I would like to spend some time to share my thoughts with you on it.
The conference
Why is this conference unique? Because it focuses on the Web and Intranet from a user perspective. It is the perfect place for large organization members to share experiences, ask questions openly and discuss a broad range of themes that varies from going mobile to health oriented intranets. The talks were thus not really made for me and as much as I found them clear and well presented, they didn't rock my world. But that's fine, because I'm not the target audience and it's also my professional responsibility to be informed and on the front of the wave. On the other hand and as you can imagine, being a vendor in the middle of all these users was really great.
The social aspect
I didn't try to pitch for Liip so much because it was clear that this went against the spirit of the conference. What I tried to do was to be as open as the rest of the crowd and try to participate and help answering some questions and problems that most of web project managers, social strategists and intranet managers have. The effect has been tremendous, I ended up having enlightening and rich discussions on many different aspects of the business I'm in. I was surprised and astonished to see how much Liip and my professional experiences generally seemed to interest and impress others a lot. I heard many times āOh really, and I thought there was no way to get this doneā¦ā.
Conclusions
Here is a small list of some conclusion I could make after so many discussions.
On Mobile strategies : Ā Niwea is the trend governments and large corporations adopts for their intranet strategies.
On User Experience practices: Doing the workshops that Liip does ( the 5S model) and integrating the UX process into SCRUM clearly appealed to the people.
On CMS s: Decoupled components and going away from a monolitic block is the future of CMS, open or not. We try to reach that with Symfony CMF
On project management : Successful project with SCRUM were common contrary to more traditional approaches that brought mostly cost explosions and years late delivered projects.
I have more examples but what I would like to share here is that this conference has been an incredible chance to get a strong validation that Liip has a great strategy. It's difficult to phrase the overwhelming feeling that I constantly felt during the conference. Liip is doing the right thing, answering real needs and in the perfect way. The best part is that's it's not me saying this, it's the sum of validation I brought back with me.
On top of that I met some really great folks, inspiring, sometime challenging, always interesting and extremely open. This openness is the main speciality of the conference and make it totally worth it.Ā It's my take home message. Be open minded, don't close yourself in a mentality and keep listening to other, there is everything to win doing that!